La Parade des Animaux bizarres

This work was commissioned by the festival Ma Vigne en Musique through its artistic director, pianist Cyril Guillotin. Apart from the addition of instruments to the percussion part and the absence of a harmonica, the instrumentation is identical to that used by Camille Saint-Saëns for his Carnaval des Animaux.
The piece would begin after the performance of the Carnival, which would bring about thematic superimpositions present in Introduction. The narrator becomes the spokesperson for “strange animals”, imaginary or not.
There are mixed animals like the Rabbitouille or the Crocognou, animals from myths like the Unicorn, the Kraken or the Phoenix, poetic visions like the Glass Swan, and real animals like the Dung Beetle and, of course, the human being.
I conceived the piece as a whole, a sequence, an imaginary parade. The performers will have to remain as precise as light, the music really playing with the text. I thank the spirit of Camille Saint-Saëns for having created this beautiful material which I use, sometimes, here to make my own music.
The narrator will make sure to be reactive so that the text/music sequences are as natural as possible.
Basically, these are little fables, and I hope that young and old alike will be seduced, amused or, who knows, perhaps moved by these bizarre animals, for it was at this point that, with my childlike side, I wrote the text and music for this Parade, aided for Le Kraken by the magnificent words of Victor Hugo in an extract from Les Travailleurs de la mer.
Benoît Menut